Blood and Fear: On the Life Cycle of Lah
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BloodandFear |
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Infobox data from game version 2.0.207.72
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Crisp pages of goatskin vellum are bound into a codex.
Contents
Author's Foreward
I initially had no intention of writing any of this down. What business is it of mine, I thought, to divest the ignorant of their hard-earned bliss? Who am I to speak up against the static inertia of incurious dullards who choose to cultivate their lack of awareness of the world around them as my witless kin tend to their tidy watervine rows? I am a warrior, scientist, and chef; devoting my time to educating the undeserving is the least of my many desires. After enough time spent among other alleged sentients, however, I determined that more of my time has been wasted in correcting so-called 'experts' concerning this matter than I would waste by writing a text about it.
So: here. You're welcome.
Chef Agate Severance Star
In Bey Lah, the village faundren sing a cautionary tune, passed down through generations of faundren before them:
Elohart and Belahind
they had a field of lah
they made the leaves into a tea
and ate the petals raw
but when those petals grew again
the faundren had forgotten
and tended not those fields of lah
until they smelled most rotten.
Now Elohart and Belahind
lie in a field of lah
because their fields got hungry
and devoured the faundren raw.
The very core of hindren culture is an overwhelming fear that governs every facet of their being. They call outsiders 'kendren' and refuse to believe that they can be understood. They fear boars even as they cook and eat boar-flesh. They fear one another. But the most extraordinary incorporation of fear into the hindren way of life is, without a doubt, the cultivation of fear. I refer not to the Hindriarch's propaganda or proliferation of fear-mongering tall tales, though both are mainstays of Bey Lah; I refer specifically to the taming and cultivation of the lah plant, whose alpha and omega of life are steeped in blood and fear.
It is here that I debunk the most common misconception concerning lah: that the dreadroot is a separate entity. It is not. The dreadroot is the protruding stem of the lah rhizome, doing its very most to survive until it can blossom into the lahbloom as it does in the flower fields.
I have wasted unforgivable amounts of time and energy explaining the connection between these two life phases of the same plant to the ignorant. Usually, they will point out that dreadroot grows all throughout Qud's southwest canyons, but it is exceedingly rare to discover feral lah there. To this I reply: if, after whatever studies you claim to have made, you are yet incapable of deciphering the workings of even the most basic ecosystems, I cannot help you. For those of you who are capable of basic logic and adjustment of personal worldview, please read on.
In spite of being a 'flowering' plant, lah is not a true flower, its 'blooms' not true blossoms. Lah is a root with a decorative upper stem, reproducing through the distribution of rhizomes. The baboons and snapjaws of the canyons use the dreadroot supply for food and love the taste of its petals, and any root unfortunate enough to bloom will quickly be defoliated by hungry mammals. Though dreadroot is capable of inducing fear, any relatively intelligent creature is able to overcome the fearful association to return and eat. The process being what it is, fragments of dreadroot are distributed, the rhizome takes root, and dreadroot proliferates without thriving. So it goes.
In the flower fields, however, the varied nature of both predators and available food changes. Boars seek a varied diet mainly consisting of starapples and reptiles, not showing a particular interest in dreadroot or lah. The boars will eat lah if no better food is available, but it's quite unusual for such scarcity to disrupt boar territories. Thus: lah flourishes, gaining a measure of cognitive process, limited mobility, and a new means of reproduction.
On reproduction: another common misconception is that feral lah attacks because it is hungry. It is not. Feral lah's practical lifespan is short; it is rare for a fully-grown bloom to survive longer than a week—and during that time it subsists completely on water, salt sun, and soil. The advantage of lah's murderous demeanor is not to sustain itself, but to dramatically speed reproduction of its kind.
Most of a lah blossom's growing energy goes into making its 'tumbling pods', thorn-covered husks possessed of tremendous kinetic tension. Through violent shifting of the rhizome's weight inside, these husks roll along the ground at high speed until they encounter a living creature. They then release the surface tension of their husks and detonate, flinging flesh-piercing thorns and buds all around, just after making an obnoxious squeaking noise. If the prey is killed, the rhizome buds can then take nutrients from the prey's corpse and quickly grow into a new feral lah plant.
There is no textual 'proof' to present to those who still believe that dreadroot and lah are different plants, but I happily invite skeptical parties to babysit a dreadroot and defend it from baboons until it matures, an endeavor that will take about as much time as you have removed from the end of my life through the stress of listening to your absurd demands.
Any hindren pariah you meet will have seen dreadroot mature into lah countless times. Go bother one of them.
For those who are more interested in the culinary applications of lah in all of its life cycles than said life cycles themselves, I soon plan to release The Blood and Fear Cookbook, a collection of recipes that, from feral leaf crudites to petalsteaks, elevate one of Qud's more interesting plants to a level far beyond the bland mah lah soup of my village of origin.